Absolutely loved Firelands and the Molten Front area, my problems lies with a very short/rehashed Dragonsoul and a short Firelands.

Launch was fantastic despite feeling very disconnected going everywhere. The raiding content aside from being tuned awfully was plentiful, dungeons were difficult and the revamp was fun to level through.

For me however expansions have to have smooth sailing throughout, and Cataclysm was probably the worst example of smooth from launch to end.

TBC - Launch (awesome), end (awesome). Not going to include a middle because they threw everything at us at once and had massive gaps. Personally the wrong way to do it, but it was still good.

I'm reluctant to even list the ending as pretty good for MoP because I think it's personally awesome. As a raid I like it more than ToT, but I liked the story progression and the Isle of Thunder far more. Timeless Isle will ultimately probably have a purpose in the grand scheme of things, but it is seemingly random.

Most of my criteria for what I consider good is based on dungeon/raid content. WoTLK zones, story and overall theme for launch were really nice. It had a lot of dungeons too. My problem and what made WoTLK one of the worst launches for me is that the difficulty and sense of accomplishment was non-existent. I got an instance that I personally did nearly the entirety of as rehashed watered down content, and basically had nothing challenging to do aside from arena for 6 months.

So while it may appear based on my above analysis that I think WoTLK is the worst, it really isn't. Cataclysm still holds number one for worst expansion for me. MoP/TBC are very close as far as best goes, and most of my love for TBC stems from a time when the majority of my friends were still playing and the content was still challenging (compared to say WoTLK launch).

I do tire of the Asian themes in MoP though. It was a really nice breath of fresh air for the first several months, but it's lasting appeal just isn't as fun as past expansions. Obviously it's still dark and deep story wise (which I love), I am more or less alluding to the continent itself.

How is that nostalgia? It's realism.
Nostalgia would be if this thread was about "the good old days" in Cataclysm, but it isn't. It's that Cataclysm wasn't as bad as people are pretending it to be.

It isn't that Cata wasn't as bad as people remember its that in many ways it was worse and a lot worse at that. It is the expansion that cut the amount of things we had to do in half by combining 10 man and 25 man. It is the expansion that gave us 2 tiers of a combined bosses (a pathetic number) and of those 15 only one is fondly remembered and many of them (hi spine and riolyth) are remembered as terrible. So there was next to nothing to do outside of raiding and the raiding was bad so thus the expansion was bad its really that simple.

Saying Cata is bad is incredibly subjective. And I say Cata is just as subjectively bad as I ever remember it.

I had a job where I simply could not maintain the playtimes of a hardcore guild. So I had to find guilds with less raid days and looser attendance requirements. This resulted in me being in mostly social guilds. And they were bad. I actually found one guild where they could progress but their behavior was unacceptable. So because Blizzard had chose to raise the difficulty level of raiding I was basically locked out the first two teirs because I couldn't find a guild that was good enough or worked for me. Firelands was more of the same, and there was no fun to be had running the overnerfed previous teir that anyone could faceroll through. I ended up unsubbing a week into Firelands patch.

There was a massive lack of end game content. There was a single max level zone and Twilight highlands was quite boring, it literally had nothing but the dragon maw and wildhammer quests which had zero variety. Redoing the old world was a massive waste of development time.

I could rant on and on, like how bad Uldum is, but the fact of the matter is I hated cata. With a passion. Blizzard put nothing in the game for me, and unless they make another disaster Cata will always be the worst expansion on my list when I rank them.

To much time wasted on redoing the 1-60 leveling content. I know some people like it, but considering how quickly you can out-level zones it was a waste for the majority of players.

It also destroyed most raiding guilds thanks to the Cataclysmic raiding changes, which they've spent the last few years reversing. 10 man worked really well as a casual raid size in TBC and Wrath, but not as the default raid size in Cata/Mop.

I consistently played it, so I can tell you the following:
-T11: pretty okay. took a bit long tho, but was quite okay.
-T12: quite nice, tho the global nerf halfway felt like blizzard taking a massive dump over those that were actually trying to do the fights and still slowly progressing.
-T13: ended up being 50%+ duration of Cata. Was shit, so 50%+ of Cata ended up being shit. Shitty instance, shitty instance entrance, shitty loot model, several shitty fights, shitty global nerfs.

First tier was great. Blue's were pretty good and they didn't really hand out epics. The only reason i enjoyed Cataclysm is because it was the expansion that i leveled all my alts up to 85. I don't know why but i was a leveling machine during that expansion, but MoP i can barely level toons to cap. The leveling experience in MoP is absolutely abysmal. MoP did refine LFR and i love the timeless Isle tho. Also the farm was really fun for awhile.

The raid sucked, everyone can agree.
What I liked most about Cata was how difficult it was at launch.
I was in a guild with some friends and we were trying desperately to down Heroic Shadowfang Keep, but we couldn't because the healer needed more spirit first, so we did a few easier dungeons/bosses to get the loot for the healer and it felt like true genuine progression when we downed the boss.

Then they made it easier because of the loud minority and I didn't feel challanged and stopped playing.
Now I've returned to see how WoD will do.

Cats was terrible, but MOP is just as terrible, perhaps making Cata look ok to some people.

From a numbers stand point it definitely makes it look better.

They've both been awful.

Originally Posted by killidan

Chances are Ghostcrawler was fired politely.

He screwed up big time too many times since he became lead systems designer. He could not carry the weight he was assigned.

Cata was a terrible expansion after the first raid tier and it is GC's creation.

I could see GC's failures in a more merciful light if he were not a total tool on forums.

Yeah, the way I see it he had a chance with Mists, and judging by the fluctuation in the way the game played from the beginning of Cataclysm to the ends of Mists, as well as his extreme disconnect with the playerbase, he missed his chance by a wide margin.

My perspective is skewed because I didn't try out Cataclysm until just before the last patch, so there was a lot of content for me, but I still think Cataclysm gets an unfair reputation, albeit for some fair reasons.

The world revamp was great, the new zones looked good (and I can't imagine a better way around how split up they were, it was just an unfortunate result of poor planning when they made the world the first time), and I felt Dragon Soul was incredibly epic. My main problem with Dragon Soul was a problem I have with every raid: all of the bosses except usually the last and one or two others are made up for the raid, but are treated like we're supposed to care about them. Reused locations? Yeah, because it (mostly) made sense. Would you rather them have invented some arbitrary new area last minute and then expect us to care about it? Old gods emerging and a war taking place in a place we knew is what helped bring out that urgent, end of the world feel. There's no way they could have gotten that feeling across in some kind of arbitrary Deathwing lair they invented last minute. Honestly, I feel like Blizzard spends too much time trying to justify large new areas all the time. We're supposed to be exploring a world, hence the name of the game. It's awfully convenient that every new villain happens to almost primarily terrorize a completely new area.

I'm not trying to defend everything, though, don't get me wrong. I feel like the expansion is unfairly underrated, not that it was perfect. I only did Dragon Soul because of LFR, I make a point of not raiding normally, but the horror stories I was hearing from veteran raid guilds was still one of the things that helped make it easy to join the expansion so late to begin with. Blizzard really overshot with the difficulty and expected longevity of content, I think, just as they would overshoot with dailies in Mists of Pandaria.

I think the ultimate problem was, as I said in a thread about Warlords of Draenor concerns, is that Blizzard overestimated the nature of quality of life changes. Quality of life tweaks are crucial to the longterm health of your game. You need them. 1-60 needed to be revamped. The 1-60 changes were great (although it could be argued they should have been even more bold, as even Blizzard is introducing ways around leveling altogether). The problem with quality of life maintenance, however, is that it cannot come on its own. As important as it is, it cannot stand alone. The ultimate problem with Cataclysm was not that they did all these revamps, it's that they didn't give themselves enough time to do much else.